


I never met a more impossible girl

by SunsetOfDoom



Category: The Alchemy Wars by Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical
Genre: Daniel has a very good day where no one is mean to him, Except Berenice but that’s fine she’s his friend, Gen, Ignore the fact that I have no idea how to play poker, Yes I know this book has no fanfics that’s why I’m writing one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-27 03:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17154533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SunsetOfDoom/pseuds/SunsetOfDoom
Summary: On the deck of theGriffon, Berenice teaches Daniel how to play poker.





	I never met a more impossible girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UnderCoverMarsupial](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnderCoverMarsupial/gifts).



> Merry Christmas, Smar, and fuck you for making me read these books.

* * *

* * *

Berenice was above decks, watching the coastline go by. Since Quebec, it had been nothing but emptiness; the devastation giving way to the natural landscape, a few deserted docks and a whole lot of pines. Occasionally there came the echoing noises of a solitary ticktock in the forest, but they seemed to just be wanderers. Stealth was really the one thing the mechanicals weren’t too good at.

 

All her conversational partners had taken off on her, and she was dreadfully bored. She’d taken out her deck of cards, and was practicing her sleight-of-hand, but there was too much wind for her to be content with that. She only had the one deck, so losing the four of hearts to the river would be a pain in the ass. Flipping the cards around idly, she tried a very basic palm, but the breeze picked up and she stilled.

 

Noise came from behind her; leg springs coiling and uncoiling. She’d lived on this boat with so many Clakkers for long enough that she knew who it was likely to be. They all sounded similar, but she was learning their different quirks. Some stuttered, some squeaked; some clicked three times before they spoke. Daniel in particular sighed like the perpetually-disappointed Abbess of Berenice’s Catholic school.

 

“Hello, Daniel.” She didn’t turn, hoping to impress him- she’d asked his name one too many times, and she was trying to buck up their listing relationship by being able to tell him apart from his cohorts. 

 

It was like trying to rebuild the Vatican with mud and sticks. He made that mechanical sigh at her again, let down by human nature once more, and took to Dutch to bid her a good-morning. (She’d also offered to teach him bits of French, but he seemed to prefer to learn from Elodie Chastain. Berenice couldn’t imagine why. She was a fine teacher, and knew all the best cursewords.)

 

“Anything happening below decks?” She asked. “I’m bored to tears up here.”

 

“Nothing.” He said, his mechanical voicebox betraying no emotion, but Berenice squinted. Well aware that they were entering a new era of communications with the ticktocks, she was making a private study of not only their language, but the ambient noises their bodies made to indicate feelings. Their moods and their expressions. Daniel’s tocking was muted and off-tune, and she was coming to read it as frustrated, and possibly sad? Or maybe angry. The learning process was unlike anything else she’d studied before, and while it drove her a little mad, it was also something to do on these long days waiting for the coast to pass them by. “Just conversation.”

 

But regardless of tone, she knew damn well what that sort of ‘ _ nothing _ ’ meant. Daniel was in some kind of snit, or she’d eat her eyepatch. She hummed, non-committal.

 

“What do you all have to talk about? I’ve gathered it’s  _ gauche  _ to ask about a mechanical’s past under the geasa, but with an uncertain future and a dull present , I don’t see much else to pontificate on.” She paused. “Except perhaps moral quandaries, but I’d expect if  _ that  _ were the subject you’d still be down there, holding forth like the preacher you seemed to have been in another life.”   
  
“I’m not-” Daniel’s shoulder cords tightened and relaxed, making a little sound that Berenice was beginning to realize signaled irritation. (Anger and stress seemed confined to the shoulders; fearful or anxious noises tended to concern their leg components. She filed this away.) “The problem is, I don’t know.”

 

Berenice looked over, blinking. All she caught was, as usual, Daniel’s impassive brass mask of a face- but the tell happened when he looked away, and down.

 

“They stop talking whenever I come near.” The sulk was clear in every  _ twang  _ of gears and springs, and he sounded just exactly like a school-child whose peers wouldn’t let him in on their game. The effect was incredibly funny on a creature who had seen more than a century pass by, and Berenice pursed her lips trying not to laugh.

 

He cut his eyes at her anyways, the bezels whirring, and she choked. “I’m sorry.” She said, losing her battle with the laughter.

 

“It’s not funny.” Daniel told her, making her problem worse. “I don’t know what they think I’ll- what, do they care if I disagree with them? Are they frightened of saying something I don’t like?”

 

“They’re probably quite terrified of your disapproval.” Berenice chuckled through her sentence, holding her head in her hands. Not funny. It really wasn’t. “Having been on the other end, it’s just harrowing, knowing the mechanical Moses is looking down his moral nose at you.”

 

The blank brass mask turning towards her somehow conveyed such an expression of weary disgust that Berenice nearly folded over laughing. 

 

People were probably staring, and she didn’t care. She’d been run through the wringer for the last three months. The last time she’d really slept was with Louis, and since then she’d been caught in explosions, murder attempts, and battlefields. Near death experiences had become her norm, she’d come all the way across the Atlantic and back, and all at once she was getting judged by Clakker Jesus for her sins. It was almost too much to bear, so the laughter became irrepressible.

 

“Alright.” She wiped the tears from her eye, empty socket aching as it usually did when she laughed or cried or breathed. “Alright. I’m calm. It’s not you, I swear, I haven’t slept in... God. I’m getting hysterical on you.” Breathing deep, feeling better, she looked up. Daniel’s head was tilted at her, his ticktocking quieted a bit from his pouting. There was a mild, melodious sound, almost like chimes, coming from his chest.

 

_ It’s alright. _ Something in his mechanisms gentled, and Daniel leaned his forearms against the railing with her, mirroring her body language. They’d done this more than once, a silent vigil. Not talking, because they both knew that talking meant lying. 

 

Those hurried moments during the siege, their rapid Find-The-Lady game with the rewritten geasa, stood between them like a canyon- but the awkwardness was becoming tolerable. Berenice thought almost longingly of the friendly moments they’d snatched when she knew him as Jax, their long trip to the new Forge before everything went completely to shit. It had taken a day and a half of constant travel on worn-out empty roads, as they told stories and played fucking endless games of I Spy.

 

That, she realized, had been her last restful moment. The scheming was on hold, she wasn’t being chased or in disguise, and she’d had a traveling companion that she had begun to trust wouldn’t murder her. It had been nice.

 

And she’d ruined it.

 

“Right.” Berenice pulled out her deck of cards, through with thinking for a moment. “Do you know how to play poker?”

 

Daniel’s head tilted at her. “I cannot say that I do.”

 

Reaching out, she patted the brass plate that covered the rods and cables of his upper arm. It was a strange second-nature action; even knowing that he’d never derive comfort or camaraderie from the touch, she did it for herself and anyone watching. A purely human signal of friendship. “Don’t worry. I’ll teach you all the rules-  _ and  _ the best ways to cheat.”

 

“I believe it.” As she turned away and flipped the cards between her fingers, Daniel turned his gaze to follow her. “You even cheat at I Spy.”

 

“As I kept telling you, it is patently impossible to cheat at I Spy. Especially at the distinct disadvantage of having only  _ one bloody eye _ .”

 

_ Somehow,  _ Daniel said in his more natural language of clicks and whirrs,  _ I don’t believe you _ .

 

“That’s fine. You go right ahead and don’t believe me.” Berenice sat down on the worn-smooth planks of the deck, crossing her legs and shuffling her cards. “And since you have the better reflexes- if this comes down to 52 pickup, I’m going to need you to take charge of rescuing the stray aces. I’ve only got the one deck.”

 

_ What does that mean, fifty-two pickup? _ Daniel asked. He crouched down, his backwards knees folding up and his talon-feet settling daintily into grooves in the wood. He looked like nothing so much as a sparrow perched on a branch, especially when he cocked his head to the side.

 

“52 pickup is when you drop all your damn cards.” Berenice explained. “52 in the deck, they go flying, you have to pick them up off of all creation. And with this wind,  _ all of creation  _ is a long damn ways. So hold on.”

 

Still handling the deck with the long-held ease of a card sharp, she finished sorting them out (no cheating just yet) and took out a few handfuls of cards. She handed the remainder of the deck to Daniel, who slid it under one of his feet, forming his sharp toes around it like a cage.

 

Flipping the handfuls up, she showed them off, explaining their meanings- royal flush, straight flush, four-of-a-kind. Then a basic demonstration of a hand- discarding some, trying to get the advantage from your draw while not giving the other players too much idea of what you had. Daniel followed it all, his eyes whirring. Berenice made another mental note- eye movement meant studious concentration.   
  
“So, you don’t know anything at all about cards?” She asked. Putting out a hand, she requested the deck back.

 

_ No,  _ Daniel clicked as he handed over the cards,  _ one of my former owners used to play bridge, but there was always another mechanical in the room with me. I was too busy telling stories and talking to pay any mind to the game. _

 

Stories like the ones about Mab, Berenice didn’t say. That seemed to be a sore subject. When she’d asked him about the Clakker folk tales on the way to the Forge, he’d insisted they were just fiction. His attackers on the riverbank had proven otherwise, and in fact given Berenice some clue that the mythical Mab didn’t like being usurped by a  _ genuine  _ savior. Talk about a broken pedestal.

 

“You liked telling the stories, then?” Berenice asked, dealing out a hand. “Make up your own at all, or just pass them along?”

 

Daniel shrugged.  _ I added details, or described things... I don’t think I ever created anything wholesale, but I didn’t like verbatim repetition either. Once I got into an argument that lasted almost a decade because I changed someone’s story in a way he didn’t appreciate. _

 

Berenice choked on her laughter. “Oh, Christ. A decade?”

 

_ When you only see one another once a year at a Christmas party, it’s hard to have a protracted discussion. _ Daniel explained.  _ He ended up resorting to message-passing, but it was an absolute run-around. I think he told the butcher’s assistant, who passed it to a mail-carrier, who had to give it to my owner’s downstairs neighbor... _

 

His speech became a little affected with that same chiming noise- discordant, but a little melodious, like a windchime caught in a hurricane. It wasn’t until his head ducked, the ringing getting louder, that Berenice realised what was happening. He was laughing. That was what a Clakker’s real laughter sounded like, this clumsy bell-like noise. Not the wheezing approximation of a human’s amusement, but real and joyful sound.

 

“Oh my God. And he can’t even haul off and hit you.” Berenice’s mouth stretched into a half-horrified grin. “That poor fucker.”

 

_ He might have, if he were able. _ Daniel admitted.  _ I wasn’t very gracious about it, to be quite honest. _

 

“His holiness admits to a flaw!” Berenice teased. Handling the cards, she took the two that Daniel handed back and dealt back two more, discarding her own three. She tried to calculate what it would take to let Daniel win this first round, let him get some confidence before she started to fleece him. Given his discard, he probably had a flush... “This just in, the mechanical’s favorite chain-breaker was an ass in his younger years!”

 

_ I never claimed to be flawless! _ Daniel protested, still laughing.  _ But he deserved it! His version was terrible.  _

 

“Is that what you want to do, then?” Berenice asked, considering her cards. “Once all this insanity is over? This is where we’d call or raise, by the way, if we were playing for money.”

 

“I don’t really understand the gambling bits.” Daniel said, switching back to human language.

 

Berenice shrugged, and dug in her pockets. She found a matchbox with a tiny  _ ah-ha! _ noise in her throat, and laid out a few matches. The wind had died down a bit, enough that she didn’t worry about them blowing away. “Here. We’ll bet match-sticks, and I can show you how it works. There’s a whole language in poker, how much you bet, how much you raise... Now’s the start of an age when you won’t be able to fall back on  _ yes sir, no sir _ as a ruse. You’ll have to learn to lie like a human.”

 

His clicking irritated, Daniel flicked a glance her way. “I can take care of myself. I’m not a bad liar.”

 

The  _ I fooled you on the Spire, didn’t I? _ remained unspoken, and Berenice was glad of it. Haughty as a cat backing down from a fight by washing her ears, she showed him the betting system. How many matches to put down, raising so much and so on given how much he had in a hand- or how much he didn’t, but wanted to make the others at the table think he did. 

 

He raised, clumsy, and Berenice let him win their first round and collect a few matches. Wordless, she dealt them both another hand.

 

_ Is... what, what I want to do?  _ Daniel switched back to his native tongue to ask her. “Call.” He said, out loud.

 

“Stories.” Berenice shrugged, rearranging her cards. Something Louis had used to do, and it disguised one of her own tells, which was playing with her rings. “Writing. Fiction, history, whatever. Would you consider it a hobby, or just something you did to get by?”

 

_ I... I’m not sure. I had some things I liked to think about, but it was... I didn’t have much time.  _ Daniel’s ambient noise kicked up to a nervous buzz, his fingers twitching on his cards.  _ I don’t know if I’d be good at it. Speaking, it’s over in moments. Putting it on paper seems like it would be too... real. _

 

It was strange how in one moment he could be the solemn messiah that the Clakkers seemed to want from him, and the next he was the anxious, dreamy storyteller Berenice had gotten to know on a long and empty road. So old, witness to all of humanity’s cruelty and disregard, and yet as wet and new to independence as an adolescent.

 

“You can also just shut the notebook if you don’t like it.” Berenice put in. “You’re good with words, though. You’ve always spoken very carefully. If you want a vote of confidence, you have mine.”

 

A shudder of gears resounded along Daniel’s shoulders, and down, echoing in the cavity of his chest. Berenice narrowed her eyes, trying to place it. If pressed, she might make the guess that if Daniel were human, he’d be blushing.

 

_ Thank you. That... means a lot.  _ He shifted.  _ I don’t know if I want to hole up somewhere and write a novel just yet, though.  _

 

Berenice snorted. “I shouldn’t think you’d have the time, with your flock following you around. Start with poetry, maybe. Two minutes to yourself jotting down couplets won’t take too much time away from preaching nonviolence to the masses.”

 

The wind picked up and died a few times, the bustle of the ship happening somewhere outside their perception. They received mystified looks from sailors and scientists, and even a Clakker or who who came above decks to find their hero engaged in petty gambling with a mad Frenchwoman.

 

Finally coming back to the game after their long nonverbal dance of drawing and raising, Daniel threw his cards down. “I fold.”

 

Setting down her flush hand, Berenice grinned like a shark, and pulled over the little pile of matches. Daniel’s click-clicking started up at an offended tempo, but he didn’t grumble, and gestured for her to deal another hand.

 

_ Where did you learn to do that? _ He asked.

 

Ignoring the subtextual  _ how do you bluff on a shit hand so well that you come out smelling of roses _ , Berenice flicked him his five cards. “I used to trawl the river with the fishermen, when I was young. Learning my trade- bluffing, lying, fitting in where I wasn’t meant to be. It’s how I met my husband.”

 

The words slipped out almost unbidden, and she tensed. She still hadn’t talked about Louis since- fuck. Fuck.

 

Silence reigned.

 

Evidently putting a few pieces together, Daniel said- something. She supposed she could have translated it as,  _ I’m sorry for your loss _ , but there were strange little meanings in the intonations- sorrow, longing, shame. Without a few weeks of learning a Clakker’s emotional language, she’d never have been able to parse it. It was a phrase so entangled with the noises of feelings within a Clakker’s body that it was hardly words at all.

 

Berenice swallowed back the reflexive  _ fuck you  _ of the pitied, held her breath until tears stopped threatening, and regained her composure. “Thank you.”

 

They played in silence for a bit, the wind whistling, the sailors giving them a wide berth. The ambient noise of Daniel’s body, to Berenice at least, helped make the silence less awkward.

 

“He would’ve liked you.” Berenice said, mulling it over for entirely too long. With a human, she wouldn’t’ve risked the awkwardness of bringing it back up after too much time had passed on the subject. But something about her strange friendship with Daniel was comfortable with its own clumsy standoffishness. After all, they’d abandoned each other in a burning building, lied to each other, betrayed each other. What was a little air in the conversation compared to all that?

 

Daniel’s head ticked to the side. “Would he?” He asked, skeptical.

 

Shoulders tensing, Berenice reminded herself that it was natural for him to assume she was lying. She usually did.

 

But in this she wasn’t. Louis had always had a soft spot for the underdog. He’d hated being cooped up among stuffy nobles, court dress and court manners. Give him a barfight, and he’d gleefully wade in on the side of the idiot getting his head kicked in. Had he ever been given a chance to interact with a free Clakker with a sense of humor, like Daniel, he would have been utterly charmed. God, Berenice could see his face in her mind, so clearly. That enormous grin at a new straight-man for his Incompetent Goofball act- his delight at Daniel’s perfect deadpan in that flat brass mask. Her heart hurt.

 

The thought of saying his name made her feel sick, but Berenice was damn determined to stick to what she’d said. Daniel could doubt or despise her all he liked, but he and Louis would have liked one another and it was a Godforsaken fucking shame they’d never meet. “Yes.”

 

The steel in her tone seemed to make Daniel sheepish. He inclined his head.  _ I didn’t mean that harshly.  _ He said.  _ I don’t think a human has ever liked me on my own merits before. _

 

“Count me the first, then.” Berenice said, laying down her cards. “Royal flush, by the by.”

 

Daniel looked down, and sat back on seeing the perfect hand.  _ How did you do that? You’re cheating again! _

 

“I’m not!” Berenice said, grinning wide. It was technically true. Everything she was doing was within the loose bounds of the rules of poker, at least the way it was played in the seedier districts. Nothing she’d done would have gotten her a knife in the gut at a riverside bar. Sure, she took advantage of Daniel’s inexperience with the game, but that was just part of the fun.

 

_ You’re taking all my matchsticks. _ He grumbled, his clicking picking up in an irritable rhythm.  _ This is unfair. _

 

“What the Hell do you need matches for, anyways?” Berenice laughed, leaning back on her hands. “You can start a fire with a click of your fingers! Frankly, if  _ you  _ were taking  _ my  _ matchsticks, that would set me at much more of a disadvantage! You should be giving them away, you firestarting hoarder!”

 

_ It’s the principle of the thing! _ Daniel cried, gesturing with a hand and snapping his arm cables. In his chest, the clattering chime of what Berenice now knew to be laughter underscored the noises of anger in his shoulders and arms.

 

Berenice kept laughing, bending over. He was so outraged. And over a deck of cards and a tiny box-worth of matches. Pocket detritus. 

 

A few Clakkers emerged from below-decks, making their customary bodily racket. It seemed that some conversation had adjourned, and that they were unsure what to do with themselves and their free time. Their brass glinting in the sunlight, they looked at Daniel and then pointedly away, as though trying not to stare.

 

Daniel stood.

 

“Where are you going?” Berenice looked up and around, slamming her hands down on the cards before they blew away.

 

“Gambling,” Daniel said pointedly as he walked away, “is against my religion.”

 

Like ducklings, the penitent ticktocks grouped up behind Daniel, and Berenice lost control of her laughter. A whole race. An entire race of sentient beings would take Daniel at his sarcastic word, and eschew gambling because their reluctant Messiah couldn’t fucking play poker.

 

Folding over, still cross-legged on the deck of the Griffon, Berenice laughed herself sick for the first time in months.

  
~~~~~

 

Thirty years later, in the Paris sunshine, there’s a magnificent gravestone; carved granite, a statue of St. Jeanne D’Arc. An inscription, dates. 

 

And offerings, left for the legend of the Last Talleyrand. The stories grew and changed after she passed, and every river-man’s tall tale ceased to be about a shadowy Frenchman’s figure working in the shadow to foil the Dutch, and took the form of a woman with an eyepatch, with her hair pulled back for her work. She unravelled the geasa, defeated monsters and giants with a straight-faced bluff and a thrown knife. A figure larger than life, the people of France still came to ask for her blessing. The base of the stone sits covered in pebbles, a few dried flowers.

 

Occasionally, too, there are scraps of paper. Scribbled poetry, folded carefully in half by self-conscious metal fingers, unsigned and left with small piles of matchsticks.


End file.
